SUSPICION AND DISPOSITIONAL INFERENCE

The role of suspicion in the dispositional inference process is examin ed. Perceivers who are led to become suspicious of the motives underly ing a target's behavior appear to engage in more active and thoughtful attributional analyses than nonsuspicious perceivers. Suspicious perc eivers resist drawing inferences from a target's behavior that reflect the correspondence bias (or fundamental attribution error), and they consciously deliberate about questions of plausible causes and categor izations of the target's behavior. They are, however, quite willing to make strong correspondent inferences about the target if they learn a dditional contextual information that renders alternative explanations for the target's behavior less plausible. Implications of these findi ngs for current multiple-stage models of the dispositional inference p rocess are discussed, and the need for these and other models to give more consideration to the social nature of social perception is assert ed.